by Rysa Walker
“Do you think you can leave him?”
“Maybe? Kelsey has him pretty heavily sedated, and now that he’s under, he’ll probably sleep. And Sophie is here. But . . . I might be better off staying here, just in case. There’s not much I can do to help.”
Thump. Thump.
Ashley doesn’t second these thumps, though.
You should stay here. If Caleb wakes up, and I’m not around . . . I mean, if you’re not around.
It’s okay. I know what you mean.
But Aaron is shaking his head. “We can always bring you back here if necessary. But Deo wants to see you. And don’t give me that worried frown,” he says, kissing the crease between my brows. “If one of Stan’s paths shows something happening to Deo, he hasn’t told any of us. Deo just suggested that it might be useful to trigger one of your visions. Maria has several Fivers, but most of them fall toward the probabilities side of the spectrum rather than the certainties side.”
“I can try. But there’s no guarantee that I’ll see anything that’s relevant. You know that. It’s . . . random.”
“Is it, though?” Daniel asks. I’m not sure how long he’s been standing in the doorway. It’s almost like he’s afraid to step over the threshold, and I know why. His eyes travel toward Caleb, as though he can read my thoughts, and then he clears his throat.
“Is it really random, I mean? I know that’s how Jaden said it works, and I know that a lot of the things you’ve seen have been pretty inconsequential. But when you’ve triggered a vision with Deo, it’s always seemed to be something you needed to know. Like it was a guided vision.”
“Guided by whom?” Aaron says.
By Jaden, I think.
But Daniel says, “By Anna, obviously.”
He’s right about the boosted visions, though. Each time that I’ve chosen to trigger a vision, it has given me some bit of knowledge I needed. As though being open to the gift changed it.
And maybe I am the one guiding the gift toward that spot, but I’m not entirely willing to discount where my mind went first. In one sense, I really do hope that wherever Jaden is now, he’s totally unconcerned with what is happening in this realm. I’d like to think that he and his mother are sitting in a park on a summer day, with their favorite books in hand. But I know that if he can see us in this world, he’d do whatever he could to push me in the right direction.
Jaden Park would be a damn good guardian angel. He’d laugh at that, but it’s true.
I’m about to tell Daniel he could be right, but something in Aaron’s expression stops me cold. He freezes, and then tears out of the room just before a gunshot rings out. Engine noise. Someone’s yelling, and there’s a thud and two more gunshots.
“Please tell me you didn’t leave Jasper alone with my father,” I say to Daniel as we run down the stairs after Aaron.
“No. Taylor’s with them.”
I reach the ground floor, taking the last few steps on a skid. But we’re too late. Through the open door, I can see Jasper. His gun is drawn, and my father is sprawled on the other side of the dirt road.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Carova Beach, North Carolina
April 28, 2020, 7:28 p.m.
I charge toward Jasper, screaming. He fires again, not even glancing at me, or at Daniel, who is holding me back.
But Jasper isn’t aiming at my father. He’s shooting at a vehicle, now nothing but taillights that are barely visible in the cloud of dirt churned up by the tires as it drives south.
“A Vigilance van,” Jasper says. “It shot once, then swerved off the road. I don’t know if he was aiming at Pfeifer specifically, or at all of us.”
Taylor and Aaron are bending over my dad. He’s conscious, but his head is bleeding, and his left leg is very clearly broken.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says. “Miller was driving, so I didn’t pick anything up until he entered my range. By then it was too late.”
“Miller?” Taylor says. “You left him in Knoxville. How did he get here so soon?”
“Probably the same way we did,” I say. “And he wasn’t stuck at Fort Bragg for two hours.”
My dad is mumbling something. I pick up the words not ideal and risperidone.
“We’re going to get help,” I tell him. “We’ll call an ambulance.”
“Dacia was expecting the helicopter to return with more people this evening,” Kelsey says as she drops down onto the sand next to me and begins examining Pfeifer’s leg. “Mostly adepts. They may have stopped to pick up Miller.”
“Let’s get inside,” Daniel says. “He could circle back around.”
“Okay,” Kelsey says. “It may not be just his leg that’s broken, though. We need to find something flat so that . . .”
The rest of what she’s saying fades away as Pfeifer grips my arm. Even with his face twisted in pain, I can tell it’s my mom at the front. “Anna. I need you to lower your walls. You’ll be in charge, I promise. I’ll control them.”
My mind flits to my bigger fear. Not the hitchers inside of Team Pfeifer, but the one inside of me.
“She will control him. I need you to trust me.”
“I do.”
“Anna? No!” Aaron tries to pull me away, but my father’s hand is like a vise on my arm. I’m thinking, Ow, that’s going to bruise, when a wave of energy surges through me.
I don’t have time to pull down a single brick. The entire horde tears through my walls like they’re made of wet paper.
I’m not sure how long I’m out. Long enough for them to get me and my father into the house. Dad is lying on what appears to be half of a Ping-Pong table. Jasper is at the window, watching in case the vehicle returns for a second pass.
These aren’t things I see. My eyes aren’t even open. I simply know.
For several minutes, I lie perfectly still, finding my equilibrium. I’m at the front of my head, but the front feels narrow. Constricted.
I slip back a bit to survey the rest of my mind office. The wall is still in place, but it doesn’t look anything like my usual neatly stacked bricks. This reminds me of the waterwall Caleb built. It’s not water, but it has that same rippling quality. More like a force field.
There’s a crowd behind that barrier. Some appear more solid than others. I scan quickly, locating a few faces I recognize. My mother and Ashley are near the front. Will and Oksana are a bit farther back. I assume the other two women I lumped together with Oksana as the Furies are there, too, but they weren’t in my head long enough for me to give them faces.
Near the back, I see Penelope Cregg. Next to her is a boy of around twelve. I don’t recognize him at first, but something about his features is familiar. When I make the logical assumption that this is a younger Graham Cregg, my mind promptly substitutes the spider-rat avatar I’ve been using. Penelope turns toward me, snarling, and he morphs back into a boy. Except for the eyes. He has spider eyes, like the ones I saw in my reflection. And then those vanish, too. Just a boy now.
Having him appear as you think of him won’t help hold this coalition together.
I don’t argue my mother’s point, even though I suspect quite a few of her fellow hitchers would agree with me that there’s a lot to be said for truth in advertising.
Outside my head, my father is cursing, loudly and fluently. I want to open my eyes, but my mother isn’t finished.
Scott told them no ambulance, and you need to back him up on that. He’ll be okay until—
A vision flashes through my mind. There’s no humming sound preceding it, so I don’t think it’s one of Jaden’s visions. I’m inside a house. Not this one and not Sandalford, but still on the beach. Through the windows, I see the night sky over the ocean. And vehicles on the beach. Two jeeps, parked facing north. It looks like there’s something between them—traffic cones, maybe?—but it’s too dark to tell anything else.
I’m not even sure vision is the right word. This is only an image. A still shot, frozen in time. I can’t even pan a
round. It’s worthless, a stupid stock photo dropped into my mind without context. But then I see the reflection in the windows and realize where I am—Bell Isle, the house where Magda lives. She’s standing next to the girl in the wheelchair. Clara or Chloe? I can’t remember. Miller is there, too, on the sofa. They don’t look happy.
NOT YET. BUT SOON.
Will’s message appears as the image fades.
“We have to go,” I say.
Everyone in the rec room falls silent. And then they all start asking questions at once.
I hear them, but I don’t answer. Aaron seems to think it’s because I’m still disoriented. He tells them to back off. To give me space. I feel strangely buoyant as I get to my feet. Even though I’m in the driver’s seat, in control, I’m somewhat disconnected from my body. Not in a bad way, though. It’s more like the body is irrelevant.
Like it’s a vessel.
“We have to go,” I repeat. “Miller is back at Sandalford. The Senator, too. Or . . . he will be soon.”
“Anna,” Kelsey says, “before you go anywhere, please talk some sense into your father. We need to call—”
“No,” Pfeifer says. His face is pale, and he’s clearly in pain. But he’s shaking his head adamantly.
“He’ll be okay.” And I do think that’s true. I don’t know for certain, though. There’s only one thing I’m certain about. “We have to go. Now.”
“Okay,” Daniel says. “But . . . what’s the plan?”
I’m about to tell him I haven’t had time to think up a plan yet. That I’ve just taken on more than a dozen new boarders, and maybe someone else could brainstorm that problem? But my hitchers have apparently been giving this a great deal of thought. My mouth opens and words roll out.
“Nudge the guard again. Hard enough for him to forget Jasper shot his partner. He’s supposed to take Maggie back to Sandalford. We go along for the ride.”
I reach up and touch my face as I speak. My hands are under my control. And it’s me talking. But it’s also more than me.
“A Trojan horse strategy,” Taylor says. “And once we’re inside?”
“We wait until Maggie is safe. And then we fight.”
Again, the words are out before I know what I’m going to say. It’s as though there’s a conference going on inside my head, but I can’t hear it. I only get the action memo.
That frightens me. It’s not like in the visions where every step, every word, is foreordained. And unlike the memory gaps when Cregg was in charge, I know what I’m saying.
You’re in control, Anna. But if I let you hear everything going on back here, I don’t think you’ll be able to function. It’s a bit—
Chaotic. Yes. I remember from when I picked up the Furies that night in the lab.
They like that name, by the way. They say they are all Furies now. United. One goal. But . . . we have to go.
“Getting through the gate isn’t going to be easy,” Taylor says. “There are five of us. Against fifteen guards, at least. Even with Jasper’s weapons, we’re seriously underpowered. Our best bet is to simply go in and tell Dacia we’re joining her. Maria told Dacia that she trusts us. That we will fight with them against Cregg.”
“Dacia won’t believe that,” I say, this time not drawing on whatever psychic consultations are going on at the back of my head. I know this because I know Dacia. The Furies know her too, and none of them disagrees. “Dacia’s not stupid. She knows we’ll turn on her. If we wait, we’ll be fighting her people and Senator Cregg’s people at the same time. Maybe even the damn military.”
Taylor shrugs nervously. “Fighting her first is one of the main paths. But Stan said the odds . . . You know what, never mind. Let’s just go.”
Daniel and Aaron fetch the guard and move my father to one of the beds on the ground floor while Kelsey goes up to get Maggie. I thought Maggie might be hesitant to leave, but she seems eager. Caleb still exhausts her, even when she’s not in the same room. She crawls into the passenger seat and buckles up as soon as Jasper brings the van around from behind the house.
Kelsey pulls me aside. “I gave your father the morphine intended for Caleb, over his protests. His leg is badly broken, and I don’t want him moving around. Are your walls still up?”
“Sort of. There’s something there, but it’s not my usual barrier. I’m in control, or maybe I should say we’re in control. My mother is doing some of the . . . management tasks.”
Kelsey still looks worried. “And Graham Cregg?”
“He’s behind the wall with the rest of them.”
“Is your mother managing him, too?” There’s a question in Kelsey’s voice, and I understand why. She knows how easy it is for Cregg to turn the tables.
“He’s under control,” I say, trying to remember how much, if anything, I’ve told Kelsey about Penelope Cregg. “We have to go.”
“I know.” She hugs me tightly. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Remember what happened when you tried to use Hunter Bieler’s ability? Don’t take any unnecessary chances.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Taylor is next to me. Kelsey reaches out to hug her too, but then sees the gun Taylor’s extending toward her.
“I don’t want that,” Kelsey says. “I don’t know how to use it. Give it to Sophie.”
“Already gave her one,” Taylor says. “Safety is here. Trigger is here. Turn safety off. Point. Pull trigger.”
Sophie stands on the steps, arms crossed, a small silver pistol in one hand. She looks annoyed, but I don’t think it’s about the gun. “I’m not certain I can block that kid if he’s as wound up as he was today.”
“It shouldn’t be as bad,” Kelsey tells her. “Even if he wakes up, he released a lot of the pain earlier. We’ll manage.”
Sophie looks less convinced, but she nods. “Be careful.”
We crawl into the back of the van for the short ride to Sandalford. Whatever Daniel said to nudge the guard seems to be working. The guy slides behind the wheel without the slightest hesitation and seems relaxed, no doubt relieved that the “freak” he’s transporting now isn’t one of the dangerous kind. He’s totally oblivious to both his injured trigger finger and his five extra passengers.
Daniel and Jasper take up position at the back of the van, rifles in hand. I sit closer to the front, next to Aaron. Taylor offers me one of the guns from the stack, and everyone looks a little nervous when I laugh. To be fair, the laugh didn’t really sound like me, maybe because it was both my laugh and a reaction from the steering committee. But if Taylor had seen what the Furies did to that cafeteria at the prison, she’d understand that I do not need that rifle.
Something occurs to me then. One of the words my dad mumbled when Kelsey was examining his leg. Risperidone. Yes, he was on the drug, too, and at a much higher dosage. But it probably hadn’t had time to kick in. I’ve been on it for weeks. So yes, me taking on the Furies is probably not ideal—which is the other thing he mumbled.
Your father had to hold back. He struggled to control their abilities, especially for those first few days. That’s why he had to keep venting, but . . . think of the damage at the prison and in that parking lot as a tiny valve letting off just enough steam to keep him stable. The risperidone isn’t going to stop the Furies from getting the job done. If we have to, we’ll crank it up to eleven.
I think of Kelsey’s comment about Hunter Bieler. I’ll be perfectly happy to get out of this with a blistered hand. But Hunter’s ability is a tiny match. The firebug inside me now is a blowtorch. Nothing happened to my dad, but who knows? As Jaden often noted, different brain, different rules.
I’m not suggesting we put you in danger. Kelsey’s right. I said, if we have to, we crank it to eleven. We won’t start there.
Do what you have to do. I’ve been singed before.
Aaron moves closer. “Talk to me, Anna. Let me know what’s going on. It’s still . . . you, right?”
“Cregg’s not in control.”
&nbs
p; “Yes. I can see that. But it doesn’t answer my question.”
“I think I’m a group project now. Anna to the Infinite Power.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I, actually. But someone back there must.” He raises his eyebrows, and I go on. “It’s like . . . I’m in control for the most part, but some preliminary negotiations for what I do happen behind the force field. My mother is . . .” I stop, trying to think of a way to explain it. “She’s the conductor. There are different instruments, and she’s controls when they play and how loud. But I can pull the plug if . . . Never mind, it’s a crappy analogy.”
Aaron smiles. “Now that comment sounded like you.”
I hold his gaze for a long moment. “This is me. But Kelsey was right to be nervous. Everyone needs to remember that Cregg is still in here. So is his mother, and she seems to be holding him at bay, but . . . keeping an eye on me might not be a bad idea.”
“Always happy to do that.” He leans in and kisses me before the van rounds the curve onto the shore road, jostling us apart.
Another van passes, heading in the opposite direction, as we turn onto the shore. The driver flashes his headlights in greeting. Snoop’s warning that Dacia has bears combing the beach was dead on.
I exchange a nervous glance with the others as we approach the gate, wishing that Daniel would tell the driver to hold our course and keep going down the beach, even though I know we can’t do that. Judging from the expression on Aaron’s face, he’s feeling the same way, but then he’s always on edge when we’re at Sandalford.
The man at the gate isn’t with Vigilance Security. Must be one of Dacia’s men. He waves us through without question, though, and the driver heads down the path toward the guesthouse where they park the company vehicles. The fist clenching my stomach loosens a tiny bit.
Maggie looks back at me, a question in her eyes. I nod, and Maria’s voice immediately fills my head. Taylor, Aaron, and Daniel look up too. A conference call, apparently.
Finally you are here. We could not reach you even by the text. Miller is back. And Dacia knows Caleb is not on the island.